February 21, 2009http://digitaltools.node3000.com/blog/527-the-secret-pacman-dossier

…appeared on the Internet. The Top Secret Document contains every know information, that is about PacMan. For example, just examine the lesser knows facts about the design of the levels and the mysterious level 256 in Pac Man. From the document:

Pac-Man was always meant to be a game with no ending. The developers at Namco mistakenly assumed the game’s increasing difficulty was sufficient to prevent anyone from playing indefinitely. Of course, within a few years of Pac-Man’s release, players had discovered that every level beyond the 21st was identical. Patterns were quickly created to exploit this fact and, for any player able to get past the first 20 levels, the game now became a test of endurance to see how many points you could rack up before losing focus and making a mistake. High scores soared into the millions and most players agreed the game simply went on forever. Eventually, a few highly-skilled players were able to complete 255 consecutive levels of play (scoring over three million points and taking several hours to accomplish) and found a surprise waiting for them on level 256. It was a surprise no one knew about-not even the developers at Namco.

The 256th level displays the left half of the maze correctly, but the right half is a jumbled mess of randomly colored letters, numbers, and symbols. Notice the bonus counter in the lower-right of the screen is also malfunctioning. The left side of the maze plays normally, but the right side is a different story. Although both the player and the ghosts can navigate through the right half of the screen, the original maze walls no longer apply. Instead, Pac-Man must be guided through a confusing series of open areas, tunnels, one-way intersections, lone walls, and pass-throughs-all invisible to the player-while four ghosts are in hot pursuit.

PacMan Level 265 with hidden points

You definitely want to know all this things about PacMan. The reason for the “malfunctioning level” i.e. lies in a internal counter error. Just keep on reading on the dossiers site. They also got extensive information about the enemy-characters as well.

February 19, 2009http://www.floriankuhlmann.com/2009/creative-commons-diesmal-fur-die-ohren/

February 17, 2009http://digitaltools.node3000.com/blog/511-ratloop-gearhead-garage-adventure

The Gearhead Garage Adventure is an mixture of repair- and race game. You play a guy, who has great abilities in repairing cars, but not so much in driving them. So in parts this is a “repairing game”, some sort of mini-games, that let you put together and polish different parts of the car. Other sections of this game includes driving and exploring action. Look, feel, graphics and style look very, very promising. The game was made for the GBA, but was unfortunately never published, due to cartridge prices back in 2006. But you can cheer up, because there is a demo-GBA-file available on the website.

The game was made by Ratloop, who also are responsible for Mightier. It seems to me, that really Ratloop got distinct out-of-the-ordinary thinking abilities. Thank you guys at Tiny Cartridge so much for digging this content.

An interesting design detail can be found on the lofi-platformer “You probably won’t make it“. Each level features only one single screen. The game keeps on suggesting, it is a “brutal hard” game. In order to reach the goal, you have to make use of double-jumps, avoid the “needles” and reach the goal. Well, if you loose a life, than the blood of your death and - this is the interesting detail - the path of you last played game will be displayed on screen. Nice thing to visualize and really not hard to implement. It is somehow a more static version of that trail of the Feist-character.

I think the game is not too hard, and the music is good, but a little bit repetitive.

February 14, 2009http://gamedesignscrapbook.blogspot.com/2009/02/wiicked.html

Actually, this one should be posted by my colleague Yu-Chung Chen since it was more his work bit he is busy or recovering or lazy or ass.

We recently did a nice project at KISD where we experimented with the the Wiimote and Flash. I was only involved as a supervisor, Yu-Chung actually did some (pretty hardcore!) development. Even though the results were still in an experimental stage, they were nothing short of amazing!

I had a great time! The presentations were ok. I guess my problem was that most of them were either producers or from marketing and so the topics they covered were a bit remote and dry. We need to change that! Game Designers need to get more involved, especially the small flash developers!

But I was happy with my talk (video coming!) and the thing that made it all worthwhile was the opportunity to get in contact with a load of very interesting people. So if you are raeading this: you guys are awesome! Thanks again to Mr. Badim for having me!

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